I needed a way of exporting the email messages from Gmail to Excel CSV format recently, and there’s a lot of random (and confusing) solutions listed online, so thought I’d blog about the one that actually worked for me.

It’s all pretty straight forward – here’s how.

Step 1: Download & Install Thunderbird

Hop over to the Mozilla website and download the email client Thunderbird. Once you’ve installed it, open up the program and head to step two.

Step 2: Add Gmail Account to Thunderbird

Once you have Thunderbird open, select the option to add a new account and enter your Gmail credentials. Thunderbird should automatically detect the default Gmail settings, giving you the option to select either IMAP or POP3. For the purposes of this, I selected POP3 (to store emails on my computer), then clicked the ‘Done’ option to finalise.

Step 3: Import Gmail Messages

Next up, click the ‘Get Mail’ option in Thunderbird to import the email messages from Gmail.

Step 4: Install Import/Export Addon for Thunderbird

As Thunderbird doesn’t offer the export to CSV functionality as standard, you’ll need to grab this import/export addon which will do the trick. Download and install the addon.

Step 5: Download Gmail Mails as Excel CSV

You can now select multiple emails within Thunderbird (hold CTRL and click in Windows for multiple selections). Once you have selected the messages you want to export to Excel CSV, simply right click and select the ‘Save selected messages’ option, then ‘Spreadsheet (CSV)’.

This should do the trick, with your selected Gmail messages appearing as seperate rows within an Excel CSV file (downloaded to the destination you chose).

I spotted this afternoon that Rhys was selling a few of his domains and it reminded me that I have a few knocking around that I’m happy to let go.

Below is the list of domains I’m looking to sell on, along with their approx. monthly search volume (taken via the Google AdWords Keyword Tool). None of the domains have any history in terms of having websites on them, as they’ve kind of just been sitting around in my 123-reg account. Drop me an email (kieronhughes[at]gmail[dot]com) if you’re interested!

Last week I was reading Chuck Palahniuk’s AMA on reddit and one particular answer struck me. The question posed to Chuck was (to paraphrase), “What offends you?”, to which he responded:

What offends me? Waste offends me, or great ideas that never get developed. I want to steal from every writer I meet who shares a brilliant idea that he or she will never complete.

As I looked through my domain list on 123-reg this morning, that quote struck a chord. I have 20 registered domain names, down from around 35 about 6 months ago. The amount of sites that sit live on them? One. This blog. And that wasn’t even live until today.